Frederick S. Wight (June 1, 1902 – July 26, 1986) was a multi-talented cultural leader who played a significant role in transforming Los Angeles into a major art center. An influential educator at the University of California, Los Angeles, who presented museum-quality exhibitions at the campus gallery later named the Wight Art Gallery, Wight was also a highly accomplished painter and writer. In his final years he concentrated on his painting, producing radiant landscapes that appear to be animated by mysterious, spiritual forces. Early life Frederick Stallknect Wight was born in New York City, the only child of Carol Wight, who became a professor of English and the classics at Johns Hopkins University after a struggle with mental illness, and Alice Stallknect, an artist with a forceful personality who encouraged her son's creative proclivities. The family moved repeatedly during Frederick's childhood, finally settling in Chatham, a small fishing town on Cape Cod, Massachusetts, in 1910. He graduated from high school in 1917, at 15, and spent the following year preparing to enter the University of Virginia. Upon graduation in 1923, his uncle, Dr. Sherman Wight, who had financed the young man's college education, provided additional funds for him to spend two years studying art at the Académie Julian in Paris. Career beginnings Wight returned to Cape Cod in 1925 and attempted to support himself as a portrait painter. His subjects included family friends, local sea captains and, eventually, prominent arts figures such as writers Erskine Caldwell, James Branch Cabell and Henry Seidel Canby, sculptor for Jacques Lipchitz and painter Lyonel Feininger. He also developed an interest in psychologically charged landscapes and established himself as a writer. His first novel, "South", was published in 1935. His work was also part of the painting event in the art competition at the 1932 Summer Olympics. Personal life His marriage in 1936 to a young English woman, Joan Elizabeth Bingham, led to a blissful period of travel in Joan's homeland and the South of France, where Frederick painted landscapes, experimented with a new style that he called Semi-Surrealist and pursued his writing. In 1938, the couple returned to the United States and settled in Chatham, where Frederick devoted most of his time to literary work, in the hope of forging a career in writing. Their only child, George Frederick Wight, was born in nearby Hyannis, in 1942. War years and beyond Wight had considerable